You lke the content? Subscribe to get notified about new posts

Search This Blog

On Open Access and Aaron Swartz

We are all aware of how the Internet’s
networking potential has offered the human race an unprecedented globalized
means for immediate sharing and exchanging of media and information. However, and inasmuch as this sounds like a
powerful tool to leverage human knowledge and help spread it among more human
minds, this potential for sharing and exchanging has raised many problems to
established industries dealing with publishing and delivery of media and
information.

Cases like Napster, The Pirate Bay, Aaron Swartz
and many others were all conflicts between an established way of doing things
and a disruptive technology allowing us to do things in a different way. And
which of these two ways is the best for us as a global human society and as a
human race? What follows will try to provide an answer.

The freedom to access information by anyone who
seeks it has never been possible before as much as it is today with the help of
the internet, but even 18 years after the commercialization of the internet, a
large amount of information still lies behind access barriers erected by
publishing institutions and copyrights, thus making the access to it very
limited and allowed only to the privileged few who can afford it.

However, and even when the publishing industry
is deep rooted in the current ecosystem and armed with financial capabilities
that allow aggressive lobbying among policymakers and lawmakers, it is too hard
to put a case against open access, especially when it comes to research papers
and specialized magazines/journals’ articles detailing results of advanced
research. The simple reason for which it is hard to put a case against it is
that Open Access benefits literally everyone; through it researchers’ work will get more
exposure and will easily reach the audience they’re seeking to reach. And
readers in their turn will benefit too because they will have access to a wide
source of information, and knowledge will spread to reach a bigger number of
interested individuals instead of being trapped and available only for a
privileged few.

Is it a human right to have an access to the
largest amount of information and knowledge possible? I personally believe it
is, it is neither a sign of prowess nor intellectual superiority when certain
people lock up information and knowledge, discovered and achieved mostly by the help of public
funding, and deprive other people from reaching it. When information
becomes available to every single inquisitive mind, anyone can become the next
internet prodigy or the next superstar physicist or economist or medical
researcher etc.
Someone, who is proactively seeking knowledge and information, has the right to
reach it because he/she is willing to put the needed effort to harness its
potential and transform it to something useful for him/her and for the society
itself. And that’s why open access is of an essential importance, it promotes
fairness in society, gives a chance to those who are willing to work and make
an effort. It simply helps in accelerating research and consequently advancing
knowledge and technology when more minds are putting their intellectual and
mental processing power to improve, add, discover and build on the available
information.

That’s how Open Access establishes a win-win
situation for everybody, except for publishers who, by irrationally increasing
prices, make exorbitant profit margins out of something they didn’t put any
effort to create and produce. Which is a perverse way to do business, to say
the least.

Open Access defined

In a minimalist definition, Open Access is the
type of access provided by authors who, unconstrained by a direct motive of
financial gain, allow their readers to reach the content they provide without
charging a fee.

What makes it possible?

-Digitization and availability of information
in its soft form instead of the traditional ink on paper and books, coupled
with the ability to share at a global scale through the Internet.

-Copyright holder consent, and that’s what
distinguishes two categories of content providers/authors. The first category
consists of scholars, academics and researchers and the second consists of
musicians, moviemakers and the remaining types of authors.
The difference between these categories stems from how they traditionally transfer
their copyrights to publishers. Scholarly journals and publishers don’t pay
authors for their research articles, while it’s not the case of musicians,
moviemakers, and traditional novelists. And that’s why the scholarly authors
group is free to consent to OA without losing revenue. The academics’ culture
of writing for impact rather than money makes OA even more adapted to their
goals and mindset, and it’s natural that OA is taking off among this group of
authors.

The three statements revolve around the main idea of the
availability of information/knowledge on the public internet and the permission
for the user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, etc. without
financial, legal or technical barriers other than those required to gain access
to the internet itself. The only condition for reproduction and distribution is
to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be
properly acknowledged and cited.

Types of Open Access:

Open Access is usually offered in two degrees, Gratis Open Access and Libre
Open Access.
Gratis OA guaranties a free of charge access but not more free than that, users
should seek permission for any additional usage (reprinting, quoting
significant amounts of text, etc.)
Libre OA is free of charge and also free of some copyrights and licensing
restrictions. Usage permissions are usually defined by a creative commons license.

Varieties of Open Access:

There are two defined varieties through which OA is delivered, Green
OA and Gold OA.

Green OA: It consists of specialized repositories where
researchers/authors can deposit their work in a step that consists of
self-archiving and public publishing at the same time. The published work is
usually not peer reviewed and the interesting particularity is that most of
the toll-access authors are legally allowed to publish their raw work in Green OA
repositories before sending it to the Toll-Access journal.

Examples: The famous physics community repository arXiv.org, that
later expanded to include astronomy, mathematics, computer science and many
other scientific fields. It was in this repository that the aloof Russian
mathematician Grigori Perelmanhas
published his solution to Poincaré's Conjecture, one of the millennium prize
problems that resisted a score of mathematicians since 1904.

Gold OA: It’s the open access counterpart of toll access journals.
They are peer-reviewed journals that are accessible without a fee.
Example: The Springer open series of journals http://www.springeropen.com/
spanning many fields and offered by the traditional publisher Springer who partly
opted for OA with this move.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was a prominent if not the most prominent personality
in the effort to promote open access and make it mainstream. He ended his life
in January 2013 as he was entangled in the implications of his bulk-downloading
of a large number of academic journal articles from JSTOR.

JSTOR is a toll access digital library having the majority of its
content only accessible by subscription. The library reached an agreement with
Swartz regarding the incident but the US federal prosecution went on to press
charges that exposed Swartz to a possible penalty of 35 years in prison and $1
million in fines. The case was still pending when Swartz committed suicide.

With major software development achievements since his teen years,
most of Swartz work revolved in one way or another around sharing information. He was involved in the creation of the RSS web feed format, the Creative Commons organization that is playing a leading role in the licensing
and legal framing of open content, he also founded a company that later went on
to merge with, and contribute to the development of Reddit, the social news
sharing website.

He later moved on to become an Internet/social activist working to
promote transparency in government and aiming to enact what he called
progressive policies, and he played an instrumental role in blocking the Stop
Online Piracy Act in the US that was threatening to a large extent the freedom of sharing
information on the Internet.

But the turning point in his activism career that is in direct
relation to the subject I’m discussing here was his notorious “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” that
you can find here.
It's a manifesto inciting people to join him in his struggle for Open Access. He started it with “Information is power. But like all power, there are those
who want to keep it for themselves” and went on demanding to fight back against
large publishers and corporations locking up knowledge and information to
greedily make enormous profits. He ended it by calling for a civil disobedience
against unjust laws to oppose what he called a private theft of public culture.
And he explicitly called to take information wherever it is stored and share it
around in what he described as a Guerilla Open Access.
It is in this spirit that he went on to download the large amount of articles
from the JSTOR. And one cannot question the nobility of what he was trying to
achieve and most of all the important and positive implications of what he was
demanding and what he was so passionately working to achieve. But his approach
to solving the problem in a David vs Goliath style was extreme in my opinion
and cost him his life at the end. The goal is achievable without falling in the
trap of direct clashing with established laws that are clearly in favor of
publishers who lobbied to create them in the first place. Change can be
achieved with the right amount of pressure and with perseverance over time.

I believe that Open Access is a self-promoting issue, it just makes
sense, it’s a simple concept beneficial to everyone and will help to further
develop our society and the human civilization as a whole. You can’t oppose it
without standing on immoral grounds and without being politically incorrect.
And all it needs is further promotion, more awareness campaigns to point the
attention of the general public to the subject and to push it to the forefront
of public debates. Legislators and policy makers won’t be able to sustain the
pressure of staying on the opposing side and reforms and changes in
laws will be achievable. Because, and as Aaron Swartz himself said it “Try as
you might, you can’t beat reality” and the reality here is that Open Access is
what makes sense for everybody and nothing can hold it from taking over the way
of how information and knowledge are distributed, all it takes is time.

In the mean time, the work and contributions of a large number of
individuals in the open access movement to structure and define open access and
create legal frameworks for licensing open content will further push the
concept of Open Access and help in its proliferation among the public. There is
a well-crafted solution at the table that is available for everybody; Open
Access will be inescapable.

Even with the disagreements one can have with Aaron Swartz on how he
approached the subject, we can only salute his fervent support for a right
cause and his passion about making it a reality, he was an exceptional
individual and what he faced was an injustice that he didn’t accept, ultimately
deciding to put an end to his life.

It’s hard to understand how such a thing happens when for example people
who almost put the US and global economy to their knees in 2008 walked away
untouched, with large amounts of money and golden parachutes on top of it. But that’s how
things are and maybe we don’t deserve people with strong ideals Like Swartz to
stay with us for a long time.

But the legacy will continue and Open Access will continue to
advance in bold steps, the latest of them was the adoption of the University of
California of an open access publishing policy in which the university commits
to make its research articles freely available to the public. More on it here.

On Open Access and Aaron Swartz

We are all aware of how the Internet’s
networking potential has offered the human race an unprecedented globalized
means for immediate sharing and exchanging of media and information. However, and inasmuch as this sounds like a
powerful tool to leverage human knowledge and help spread it among more human
minds, this potential for sharing and exchanging has raised many problems to
established industries dealing with publishing and delivery of media and
information.

Cases like Napster, The Pirate Bay, Aaron Swartz
and many others were all conflicts between an established way of doing things
and a disruptive technology allowing us to do things in a different way. And
which of these two ways is the best for us as a global human society and as a
human race? What follows will try to provide an answer.

The freedom to access information by anyone who
seeks it has never been possible before as much as it is today with the help of
the internet, but even 18 years after the commercialization of the internet, a
large amount of information still lies behind access barriers erected by
publishing institutions and copyrights, thus making the access to it very
limited and allowed only to the privileged few who can afford it.

However, and even when the publishing industry
is deep rooted in the current ecosystem and armed with financial capabilities
that allow aggressive lobbying among policymakers and lawmakers, it is too hard
to put a case against open access, especially when it comes to research papers
and specialized magazines/journals’ articles detailing results of advanced
research. The simple reason for which it is hard to put a case against it is
that Open Access benefits literally everyone; through it researchers’ work will get more
exposure and will easily reach the audience they’re seeking to reach. And
readers in their turn will benefit too because they will have access to a wide
source of information, and knowledge will spread to reach a bigger number of
interested individuals instead of being trapped and available only for a
privileged few.

Is it a human right to have an access to the
largest amount of information and knowledge possible? I personally believe it
is, it is neither a sign of prowess nor intellectual superiority when certain
people lock up information and knowledge, discovered and achieved mostly by the help of public
funding, and deprive other people from reaching it. When information
becomes available to every single inquisitive mind, anyone can become the next
internet prodigy or the next superstar physicist or economist or medical
researcher etc.
Someone, who is proactively seeking knowledge and information, has the right to
reach it because he/she is willing to put the needed effort to harness its
potential and transform it to something useful for him/her and for the society
itself. And that’s why open access is of an essential importance, it promotes
fairness in society, gives a chance to those who are willing to work and make
an effort. It simply helps in accelerating research and consequently advancing
knowledge and technology when more minds are putting their intellectual and
mental processing power to improve, add, discover and build on the available
information.

That’s how Open Access establishes a win-win
situation for everybody, except for publishers who, by irrationally increasing
prices, make exorbitant profit margins out of something they didn’t put any
effort to create and produce. Which is a perverse way to do business, to say
the least.

Open Access defined

In a minimalist definition, Open Access is the
type of access provided by authors who, unconstrained by a direct motive of
financial gain, allow their readers to reach the content they provide without
charging a fee.

What makes it possible?

-Digitization and availability of information
in its soft form instead of the traditional ink on paper and books, coupled
with the ability to share at a global scale through the Internet.

-Copyright holder consent, and that’s what
distinguishes two categories of content providers/authors. The first category
consists of scholars, academics and researchers and the second consists of
musicians, moviemakers and the remaining types of authors.
The difference between these categories stems from how they traditionally transfer
their copyrights to publishers. Scholarly journals and publishers don’t pay
authors for their research articles, while it’s not the case of musicians,
moviemakers, and traditional novelists. And that’s why the scholarly authors
group is free to consent to OA without losing revenue. The academics’ culture
of writing for impact rather than money makes OA even more adapted to their
goals and mindset, and it’s natural that OA is taking off among this group of
authors.

The three statements revolve around the main idea of the
availability of information/knowledge on the public internet and the permission
for the user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, etc. without
financial, legal or technical barriers other than those required to gain access
to the internet itself. The only condition for reproduction and distribution is
to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be
properly acknowledged and cited.

Types of Open Access:

Open Access is usually offered in two degrees, Gratis Open Access and Libre
Open Access.
Gratis OA guaranties a free of charge access but not more free than that, users
should seek permission for any additional usage (reprinting, quoting
significant amounts of text, etc.)
Libre OA is free of charge and also free of some copyrights and licensing
restrictions. Usage permissions are usually defined by a creative commons license.

Varieties of Open Access:

There are two defined varieties through which OA is delivered, Green
OA and Gold OA.

Green OA: It consists of specialized repositories where
researchers/authors can deposit their work in a step that consists of
self-archiving and public publishing at the same time. The published work is
usually not peer reviewed and the interesting particularity is that most of
the toll-access authors are legally allowed to publish their raw work in Green OA
repositories before sending it to the Toll-Access journal.

Examples: The famous physics community repository arXiv.org, that
later expanded to include astronomy, mathematics, computer science and many
other scientific fields. It was in this repository that the aloof Russian
mathematician Grigori Perelmanhas
published his solution to Poincaré's Conjecture, one of the millennium prize
problems that resisted a score of mathematicians since 1904.

Gold OA: It’s the open access counterpart of toll access journals.
They are peer-reviewed journals that are accessible without a fee.
Example: The Springer open series of journals http://www.springeropen.com/
spanning many fields and offered by the traditional publisher Springer who partly
opted for OA with this move.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was a prominent if not the most prominent personality
in the effort to promote open access and make it mainstream. He ended his life
in January 2013 as he was entangled in the implications of his bulk-downloading
of a large number of academic journal articles from JSTOR.

JSTOR is a toll access digital library having the majority of its
content only accessible by subscription. The library reached an agreement with
Swartz regarding the incident but the US federal prosecution went on to press
charges that exposed Swartz to a possible penalty of 35 years in prison and $1
million in fines. The case was still pending when Swartz committed suicide.

With major software development achievements since his teen years,
most of Swartz work revolved in one way or another around sharing information. He was involved in the creation of the RSS web feed format, the Creative Commons organization that is playing a leading role in the licensing
and legal framing of open content, he also founded a company that later went on
to merge with, and contribute to the development of Reddit, the social news
sharing website.

He later moved on to become an Internet/social activist working to
promote transparency in government and aiming to enact what he called
progressive policies, and he played an instrumental role in blocking the Stop
Online Piracy Act in the US that was threatening to a large extent the freedom of sharing
information on the Internet.

But the turning point in his activism career that is in direct
relation to the subject I’m discussing here was his notorious “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” that
you can find here.
It's a manifesto inciting people to join him in his struggle for Open Access. He started it with “Information is power. But like all power, there are those
who want to keep it for themselves” and went on demanding to fight back against
large publishers and corporations locking up knowledge and information to
greedily make enormous profits. He ended it by calling for a civil disobedience
against unjust laws to oppose what he called a private theft of public culture.
And he explicitly called to take information wherever it is stored and share it
around in what he described as a Guerilla Open Access.
It is in this spirit that he went on to download the large amount of articles
from the JSTOR. And one cannot question the nobility of what he was trying to
achieve and most of all the important and positive implications of what he was
demanding and what he was so passionately working to achieve. But his approach
to solving the problem in a David vs Goliath style was extreme in my opinion
and cost him his life at the end. The goal is achievable without falling in the
trap of direct clashing with established laws that are clearly in favor of
publishers who lobbied to create them in the first place. Change can be
achieved with the right amount of pressure and with perseverance over time.

I believe that Open Access is a self-promoting issue, it just makes
sense, it’s a simple concept beneficial to everyone and will help to further
develop our society and the human civilization as a whole. You can’t oppose it
without standing on immoral grounds and without being politically incorrect.
And all it needs is further promotion, more awareness campaigns to point the
attention of the general public to the subject and to push it to the forefront
of public debates. Legislators and policy makers won’t be able to sustain the
pressure of staying on the opposing side and reforms and changes in
laws will be achievable. Because, and as Aaron Swartz himself said it “Try as
you might, you can’t beat reality” and the reality here is that Open Access is
what makes sense for everybody and nothing can hold it from taking over the way
of how information and knowledge are distributed, all it takes is time.

In the mean time, the work and contributions of a large number of
individuals in the open access movement to structure and define open access and
create legal frameworks for licensing open content will further push the
concept of Open Access and help in its proliferation among the public. There is
a well-crafted solution at the table that is available for everybody; Open
Access will be inescapable.

Even with the disagreements one can have with Aaron Swartz on how he
approached the subject, we can only salute his fervent support for a right
cause and his passion about making it a reality, he was an exceptional
individual and what he faced was an injustice that he didn’t accept, ultimately
deciding to put an end to his life.

It’s hard to understand how such a thing happens when for example people
who almost put the US and global economy to their knees in 2008 walked away
untouched, with large amounts of money and golden parachutes on top of it. But that’s how
things are and maybe we don’t deserve people with strong ideals Like Swartz to
stay with us for a long time.

But the legacy will continue and Open Access will continue to
advance in bold steps, the latest of them was the adoption of the University of
California of an open access publishing policy in which the university commits
to make its research articles freely available to the public. More on it here.